Es de madrugada.
It is dawn always dawn
the sun breaking through
the breaking of the soil.
The faint smell of rain from irrigated dirt
crusts of mud from the crop rows
comes home with my father
on his pants and beneath his fingernails.
No I do not want everlasting life
to be condemned to forever here
on this wasted earth no merci messieurs
unlike the Struldbruggs hailed all the way
from the island-nation of Luggnagg
discovered at the end of Book Three
of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
By ELLYN GAYDOS
I live on a wooded road posted with NO TRESPASSING PROPERTY OF GEORGE FUDGE signs. In addition to being a large landowner, George Fudge rents out dumpsters, and is rumored to be an ex-con and confirmed to be a minister. When the season is right, he plows snow. He’s plowed my driveway more than once for free. I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing outside the dollar store, kids’ jumpers and XL T-shirts fluttering brightly.
I work on a small vegetable farm carved out of hayfields owned by the local high school and woods owned by the local commune. The other young farmers and I grow food for a hundred families that come each week to get shares of vegetables, which begin in spring as ephemeral greens and end in winter as sacks of beets and potatoes.
Home from work with a heavy trash bag of compost for my pigs, I find the escaped animals locked in the chicken coop. They got out in the unwatchful summer afternoon, their snouts bending up the bottom of the fence to roam undeterred past illegible PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. They were escaping their squalid pen out of pure misery, I think. I had been watching them get shocked trying to push through, seeming genuinely angry, for the past few days, putting off moving the fence out of laziness or a desire to escape the drudgery of what I’d taken on.
By NED BALBO
Because I still remember my mother’s scar,
six inches long, an inch wide, sunken gash
below her waist, forever unexplained.
Because the scar looked rushed, a knife’s quick work
closed with no time to lose. Because, watching
her dress, I felt both love and mystery,
questions evaded, others left unasked.
our truck gathers speed as we approach the hills of el valle and for
a few seconds i am in flight we accelerate embark the horizon’s
I’ve always written my poems
on borrowed paper and borrowed time
In the camps, as a child, journaling
by the fire, by whatever light I could find.
What do you want for your birthday?
My mother asked, knowing she didn’t have a dime.
Notebooks, ’ama, paper, and a pen.
When you’re not packing cherries, you pass out crowns of Crossandra flowers
to every coworker who’s crossed a border.
You think of your father, when he said no to you moving to the city to study chemistry.
I’ve never admitted how it altered me.
I try not to think about it—the spring
the junior dropped out of school
after wearing a wire so the police could cuff
Mr. Cawley—led him out of the high school
down the long beige corridor of B-Hall
past the AP History class where I sat
with my textbook open to some European War,
trying not to think about my confusion
when I stood, the May before, in Mr. Cawley’s classroom,
as he held my book report on In Search of History.
The wish is always that we’d walk in,
Give each other bear hugs,
Tight and unencumbered,
Nothing of my body shameful,
That he’d cradle my face in his palms
And smile wide, in awe of who I’ve become,
That I’d go to him twice a year
To help me unknot something of my heart
When it broke.
By JULIO PUENTE GARCÍA
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER, with thanks to Luis Herrera Bohórquez
Para Violante, en sus primeros meses
I met Jacinta in the migrant camp where we grew up. I remember that it was the beginning of June, a few days into the start of the harvest. At that time, Jacinta had lived for nine springs—she was two years younger than me—and for obvious reasons she still used her given last name, López del Campo. Those of us who saw her timidly climb the stairs and enter the last shack, which served as our classroom, with her butterfly notebook pressed to her chest and her gaze glued to her sun-toasted legs, never imagined that in less than ten years she’d be proclaimed the artistic heir to Joaquín Murrieta, a figure shrouded in dust but fondly remembered within the Mexican communities settled in the central lands of California.
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